Web Development Live

With more than $100 million in assets, Texell wanted to drive the growth of its online channel, strengthen its Internet presence and reinforce its brand, while providing a secure forum to protect confidential data and comply with Federal regulations. According to Tony Hale, chief executive officer of Texell, what began as a simple evaluation of Web hosting providers evolved into a much more comprehensive endeavor, ultimately enabling the credit union to reap significant benefits from an extensive program that tied together multiple initiatives.

In addition to Web design and maintenance, Texell’s program incorporates Goldleaf’s marketing services, which ties the global campaign together to ensure cohesive and consistent messaging. Goldleaf’s marketing services include detailed market segmentation so the credit union can tailor specific marketing objectives to a particular audience.

“Goldleaf’s value proposition was unique, as it presented a solution that truly went beyond our initial needs,” Hale said. “Deploying Goldleaf’s technology demonstrates our commitment to our members through the creation of an easy-to-navigate, intuitive Web site, fully equipped with security features to protect our members’ confidential information. The site is customized, compliant, secure, and we were immediately impressed by the scope and depth of Goldleaf’s offering. The marketing services piece was especially attractive, as it pulls together the look and feel of the new site and couples it with marketing initiatives designed to drive more business to our institution.”

Texell is also leveraging Goldleaf’s distinct security features, including secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption, SAS-70 audit reporting and the Company’s Pharming Shield solution. Credit union executives also cited the flexibility of Goldleaf’s solution as a factor in their selection process. Texell has the capability to edit and manage content internally, which maximizes the speed and accuracy at which online information can be updated and maintained.

The site has multi-tiered authority to preserve the integrity of the data, as well as the ability for Texell to pre-create site changes that can be implemented on a timed rollout. Additionally, the solution has an automated system that archives changes to Web site content and images that will be tracked throughout the life cycle of Texell’s relationship, ensuring compliance with Regulation DD in the Truth and Savings Act.

Todd Shiver, executive vice president of Goldleaf Financial Solutions, said, “Our mission is to help our clients succeed and leverage technology to improve efficiencies, increase profitability, be more competitive, and provide the best products and services in their market. Our entire company is dedicated to the development of innovative solutions that have a positive and direct impact on an institution’s asset and customer base. Texell understands its members’ needs and has a very strategic approach to Web and marketing services, which we believe enables them to stand apart from the competition.”

OSU’s Technology Business Assessment Group will fund four faculty research projects for spring 2008. The group identified these one-year projects from a number of excellent proposals submitted in response to a solicitation earlier this spring. Funding for the program is administered by the OSU Office of Intellectual Property Management, and is generated by royalties from OSU-licensed technologies. These funded projects show a significant probability of having commercial success.

“We are pleased that the OIPM royalty stream allowed us to hold yet another competition for the spring of 2008,” Steve Price, director of OIPM, said. “It’s exciting to be able to continue the trend of developing OSU research into viable commercial products.”

Created in 2005, TBAG funds projects in need of feasibility demonstration and/or prototype development for commercialization purposes. The group is comprised of private sector partners experienced in new product identification and new technology evaluation, representation from i2E, early-stage capital investors, bankers, representation from Meridian Technology Center for Business Development, the OSU Center for Innovation and Economic Development, the OSU Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer, the OSU Associate Vice President for Technology Development and OSU-Okmulgee.

Provider of the leading enterprise open source portal, today announced that Sun Microsystems will formally be joining the Liferay open source community and will continue to contribute to the development of Liferay Portal.

Sun’s participation in Liferay’s community will result in enhanced development of enterprise Web 2.0 features and optimized performance for Liferay Portal in combination with Sun’s family of products.

Sun and Liferay plan to separately market and sell products and services based on their collaboration. Sun plans to use core elements of Liferay Portal 5.0 as the foundation for Sun’s next generation web development and collaboration platform.

In addition, Liferay will continue to offer the full suite of professional services and support for all platforms it already offers its customers.

“Sun’s participation in Liferay’s community is an indication of our community’s strength and the quality of the software we’ve produced,” said Bryan Cheung, Liferay’s CEO. “Our commitment to open standards means Liferay easily integrates with the Sun family of products. We are pleased that Sun has chosen to participate with us in building great software to serve our communities.”

“Collaborating and innovating with the Liferay community is an exciting project as we develop the right Web 2.0 tools and technologies for participants in the Network Economy,” said Karen Tegan Padir, Vice President of engineering, Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems.

“It’s clear that open source is the right approach and the communities that create them are increasingly interconnected and play a role in next generation platforms.”

Minutes after attending a seminar titled “Use Social Networking to Your Professional Advantage,” I opened my e-mail and found two invitations to join LinkedIn.com networks.

One came from a person I’d had professional contact with previously. I clicked “accept” and went on to other things. I didn’t recognize the other name, so I closed the e-mail without response. And, thanks to Ellen Levy, I didn’t feel bad about the tacit rejection.

Levy, vice president of corporate development and strategy at LinkedIn.com, just presented an overview of Internet social networking sites at the Central Exchange’s annual Women’s Lyceum, an educational and networking event. Understanding that attendees came to the conference from many different backgrounds and levels of Web familiarity, Levy prefaced her user advice with a primer. First, she explained, there was Web 1.0 — the mostly one-directional flow of information over the Internet. Think of Web pages.

We’re now in the age of Web 2.0 — an era of two-way communication that in three years spawned a host of interactive social networking sites. A show of hands indicated that about half the people used LinkedIn, a professional networking Web site, to build business relationships.

Even if you’ve never been on a social networking site, you understand the concept: It’s a cyberspace handshake. It facilitates connections. It does what Rotary meetings, phone calls, cocktail parties and e-mail have done for years.

Let’s say Joe wants a job at Hallmark Cards. Joe doesn’t know anybody in the human resources department or target department where he wants to work. But he is good friends with Sally, who has a Hallmark Gold Crown store. Sally knows people in Hallmark’s retail division. One, Bill, is the main liaison with Joan in the human resources department. And Joan knows that Fred is exactly the right person for Joe to meet. Fred, meet Joe. Joe, here’s Fred, who has someone vouching for him.

I made up that scenario, but that’s the six-degrees-of-separation concept.

A professional networking Web site might help make the connections that have always been an essential ingredient in job hunting, business development and sales prospecting. (A user also can get a wealth of professional responses quickly when posting a question on the appropriate area of the site.)

Levy emphasized that Web-based networking sites are only as good as the veracity and relevance of the people using them.

A LinkedIn connection may not make sense if you accept an invitation to join one’s professional network if you don’t know the person or don’t have ties to one’s business skills or services. “It should be a tool to leverage relationships you already have,” Levy said.

And a good professional network site should never be confused with a social networking site such as Facebook. The purposes are completely different, she said.

A professional networking site can be a good way to put your business profile — basically your resume and the services you can offer — online, where they can be seen by millions of other site users. It can spread “the message of you” a lot further and faster than passing out business cards and shaking hands at meetings.

But as much as Levy championed the professional development possibilities of Web 2.0, she reminded attendees of something that most knew well: “Time is a scarce resource.” Use networking sites judiciously. Understand that others might not have the time you do to dig deep into the site. And, most of all, she said, don’t get sucked into making a contest out of how many “connections” you can list. It’s not a matter of quantity; it’s the quality that counts.

PUBLIC radio is drawing its largest audience ever, some 28 million listeners nationwide each week. But if it’s a golden era, you wouldn’t know it from the frenetic activity to remake the genre.

In WNYC’s antiquated downtown Manhattan studios, the veteran National Public Radio and NBC journalist John Hockenberry and his co-host, Adaora Udoji, formerly of CNN, are rehearsing to find a comfortable rapport for their new live morning news program, which begins Monday. Flush from a $2 million Knight Foundation grant, this program, “The Takeaway” is designed with it partner, Public Radio International, and collaborators including The New York Times, the BBC World Service and the Boston public station WGBH, to be a stark counterpoint to the taped interviews on NPR’s venerable “Morning Edition.”

In the Chicago area, an 11-month-old FM station, :Vocalo, never mentions that it is affiliated with Chicago Public Radio. There’s no “All Things Considered” or “Car Talk”; instead hosts weave together interviews, commentary, reports and music, culled from user submissions to a companion Web site, vocalo.org.

NPR itself started the Web-radio hybrid “Bryant Park Project” last fall, hoping younger listeners would like to hear lively hosts banter about news and culture. And NPR’s year-old midday talk show “Tell Me More,” anchored by the former “Nightline” correspondent Michel Martin, aims at diverse new voices.

The urgency to find new formats is driven by audience research that can be read as glass half-empty or half-full. The 28 million weekly public radio listeners recorded by Arbitron in spring 2007 topped the previous high of 27.5 million in 2004. But the research also showed that the listeners were tuning in for shorter periods.

Public radio “had an enormous surge in listening over about a 10-year period from the mid ’90s up through about 2003, principally driven by a huge response to public radio’s news and information programming,” said Tom Thomas, co-chief executive officer of the Station Resource Group, a public radio consortium. But since 2003 “the audience has essentially been flat,” he said.

To address this, the consortium recently received a Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant to identify ways to get the audience growing again, and “Everything is on the table,” Mr. Thomas said.

Last year some 1,400 people entered the Public Radio Talent Quest, an online search for new hosts run by the Public Radio Exchange, a Web site, prx.org, where independent radio producers market their content. None of the three winners — a science blogger, a slam poet and a nonprofit executive who is a storyteller — reflect that typical public radio sound, said Jake Shapiro, the exchange’s executive director.

Executives stress that the new programming won’t abandon in-depth news, just “get away from a tone that feels too clubby,” said Graham Griffith, executive producer of “The Takeaway.” Nor do they want to tinker with existing programs; they just want more options for more people.

“A lot of the research that guided public radio’s direction in the last 30 years focused on us discovering a niche we could serve and serve well,” of highly educated, news-craving listeners, said Maxie Jackson, WNYC’s senior director for program development. But, he added, that formula “didn’t appeal to people of color.” He called it an issue of tonality.

“The Takeaway,” Mr. Jackson said, could be a model. It will be interactive, he said, and multicultural, with “voices, perspectives, contributors and stories that are relevant to a wide swath of people.” Its tone, he said, “has to be more compelling, with more verve.”

“People want to feel that the hosts are committed to the topic,” he added.

At a recent run-through, an Iowa State University economist discussed global food riots, and an assistant professor at Morehouse College dissected the Atlanta Ballet’s collaboration with the hip-hop star Big Boi. Listeners were encouraged to comment online about how fuel costs would affect vacation plans.

The morning hours where radio thrives have become a battleground, even though NPR’s “Morning Edition,” with 12.9 million listeners a week, is the second-most-listened to national radio program, behind Rush Limbaugh’s.

NPR itself created “Bryant Park Project” because the organization is “mission-driven, and if we can reach more people, great,” said Ellen Weiss, NPR’s vice president for news.

The program had a tough start. One host, Luke Burbank, quit just before the first day, Oct. 1, although he didn’t leave until mid-December. The Remaining host, Alison Stewart, is on maternity leave. Online listening is growing, and with few broadcast stations carrying the program, a plan to go Internet-only has been discussed. Ms. Weiss said that would not happen but declined to discuss coming changes.

Meanwhile in February, with competition looming, NPR cut the fees to carry “Morning Edition” that stations had long complained about by a total of $5 million (to take effect next fiscal year).

Still, stations in Boston, Cape Cod, Baltimore, Miami and across Wisconsin have committed to give “The Takeaway” a try, although “Morning Edition” will still be widely available in those places. On WNYC “Morning Edition” will shrink to five hours between the AM and FM stations, to make way for two hours of “The Takeaway.”

By June 30 the new program will be broadcasting four hours daily, although not all stations will carry the whole thing. Mr. Griffith envisions “The Takeaway” as a “breakfast table,” where a nationwide conversation can take place. Mr. Hockenberry uses a more high-tech metaphor, calling it in an interview “a massive multiplayer game, the rules and title of which are, basically, curiosity.”

Timeshare buyers are cautioned about labeling their weeks as “investments.” Think of it as prepaid vacations, timeshare developers famously say.

While an investment, especially in real estate, often stands an excellent chance of making money, the usual return on a timeshare typically centers on enjoyment rather than cash.

Timeshares continue to be big business — more than $8 billion a year — despite the sluggish economy. The American Resort Development Association reports that more than 4.5 million U.S. households own one or more timeshares in 1,604 resorts.

A growing number of entrepreneurs, with an exceptional grasp on how to purchase, close and sell timeshares have begun to acquire inexpensive weeks at upscale resorts via resale channels. They then rent out the properties at a weekly or a per-night rate comparable to what a nice hotel would charge.

“We have people who will go to our Web site and buy 10 weeks at a time,” said John Locher, vice president of sales and marketing for Redweek.com, an online conduit for timeshare buyers, sellers, landlords and renters. “They have studied certain resorts and markets and know what’s possible as far as rental income during a majority of the year.”

Steve Shermoen, a self-described “small-town attorney” from International Falls, Minn., said he now controls about 100 timeshare weeks and plans to spend most of his retirement years rotating through some of them in different parts of the world. Is he concerned about owning so many pieces of the only real estate asset class that always loses money when resold?

“You cannot make the rental concept work if you buy directly from the developer,” Shermoen said. “You have to be sure of what you are buying and purchase only on the resale market. The cost from the developer simply is too high for it to become a rental that will pencil out.”

Shermoen and others like him typically stick to Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton and other upper level properties that they can pick up at a fraction of the original purchase price. They often seek sellers who are extremely eager, often desperate, to dump a timeshare contract because of unexpected circumstances including loss of job, divorce or death. Many timeshare bargains can be found online right after the annual fees are announced for the coming year. As an attorney, Shermoen also offers to close the transaction at a discounted fee.

“Many people are grateful that there is a buyer who is willing to take the week off their hands,” Shermoen said. “They simply are tired of paying the annual fee and can’t wait to get out from under it.”

I was one of them, yet I didn’t even consider renting it out. Nearly 20 years ago, I spent hundreds of dollars marketing the timeshare and considered myself extremely fortunate to get back most of my investment. While some people swear it’s the only way to travel with a family and that the international “bank” of resorts not only offers flexibility but also destinations they normally would not consider, it didn’t happen for us. Basketball tournaments, family reunions, budget restraints and four different school schedules, coupled with the fact that we are very picky about accommodations, led to a three-year timeshare shutout. We owned the “points” for three years and never spent one night in a timeshare resort.

Timeshares come in a variety of packages, including a points program where owners exchange a specific number of accumulated points for a week, weekend or individual nights at resorts that participate in the points arrangement. Some of the larger timeshare companies now offer a point system, permitting owners to split the traditional week into smaller segments. The concept has worked very well for out-of-town family reunions, weddings or simply a needed weekend getaway.

The idea of breaking up the timeshare week into a few one-or-two night stays can also make sense for vacationers traveling a country by car. The average worker typically receives two or three vacation weeks each year and often prefers not to spend a large percentage of that time in one location.

The value of the points can vary greatly. For example, weekend nights will require more points than weeknight stays, and popular resorts will demand more points than a run-of-the-mill getaway. In addition, the future value of points also can be a consideration — not unlike trying to predict the future value of money.

Similar to dollars, timeshare points can be worth a lot more today than they will be down the road. If a resort continues to increase the number of points necessary to rent the unit you covet, the value of your allotted points will decrease. You will need more annual points than the number you are receiving now to reserve the same unit. Seniors and other consumers on fixed incomes may not be getting the perpetual week they initially purchased, which could seriously curtail their dream vacations down the road.

Properly applying points and a resort’s bonus time are just two pieces to successfully renting timeshares. There’s also a huge caveat when shopping.

“Some people try to sell you weeks they don’t really own,” Shermoen said. “It’s another one of the pitfalls to consider when buying and selling. Acquiring and renting out timeshares is complicated and not for the unwary. If you are going to jump in, you have to do your homework.”

Everyone knows the Web has come a long way since its early days, and one of the most changed areas has to be e-commerce. A landscape once dominated by boutique, Web-only shops, sparsely populated with shoppers, is now home to every major retailer and corporation on the planet. Selling goods on the Web has become huge business.

Many companies’ fortes, however, are in brick and mortar storefronts. For others, the only selling they have done is wholesale to retailers; selling direct to end-customers just wasn’t an option. They would love to take advantage of the Web Development Classes additional sales channels the Web opens up, but time and money spent building a e-commerce applications, as well as the high-availability, highly scalable environment needed to run them, is time and money that could be spent on core business processes. If only there was somebody to handle the legwork of building, managing and housing such an application …

For big companies that need enterprise-class e-commerce applications, that somebody is Demandware. Based in Woburn, Mass., Demandware offers an on-demand e-commerce application that customers use to service their consumer-facing needs.  According to Vice President of Engineering and Technology Wayne Whitcomb, the company’s platform is like licensed enterprise software that customers can customize, extend and Web Development Classes integrate as they wish, but without the burdens of development or delivery via computing resources.

As opposed to the old ASP model of hosting applications, though, where everything was individually managed and quarantined, Whitcomb says Demandware’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform allows the company to deliver new features and innovations “all the time, to all customers.” Being able to roll out these updates across the customer board is very important, too, because Demandware’s customers are large retail brands facing substantial competitive pressures. The demands of being a real-time business, finicky customers trends, aggressive competition and the need to drive customer loyalty via the Web site make for a situation where retailers not only need a high-performance, highly available solution, but also one that is constantly evolving.

“Normally in an enterprise application, for reliability, security and stability, you’d want to minimize change as much as possible,” says Whitcomb. “However, the [e-commerce] market demand and consumer demands are exactly opposite that. They push for frequent change, innovation and dealing with unpredictable consumer traffic at the Web Development Classes same time.”

Perhaps this necessary combination of both application and platform innovation is the reason Whitcomb says Demandware has little to no competition in the high-end e-commerce market. SaaS options like Amazon WebStore and eBay ProStores work for the low end, he noted, but just are not designed to handle larger companies’ needs in terms of branding, customer experience and scale.

To ensure it can deliver adequate capacity, scalability, reliability and security, Demandware chose to build a closely coupled grid computing delivery platform for its application. The platform is comprised of a series of PODs (points of delivery), which Whitcomb explains as e-commerce appliances with packaged compute capacity that Demandware deploys to tier 1 datacenters globally. The company directly manages those PODs, as well as the customer environment, sandbox development environments, integrated test environments, pre-production staging and production environments, all of which are isolated from one another within the Demandware grid. “To effectively manage all of those environments requires a lot of automation and a lot of flexibility of the delivery platform that really can only be provided through grid computing techniques,” Whitcomb says.

As for the nuts and bolts of the grid, Whitcomb says blades, each of one of which is imparted with a persona, handle the computing. Each blade’s persona determines how it will participate in the grid, and the persona model allows Demandware to envision how customer environments will utilize that capacity. Customer environments can be flexed to meet significant changes in demand (e.g, 10:1) in a matter of minutes, said Whitcomb. Computing resources within the grid are pooled using Demandware’s internally developed virtualization software.

A flexible, dedicated grid delivery platform is necessary, says Whitcomb, because the alternatives are either economically or pragmatically infeasible. Whereas Demandware can invest heavily in research and development of the platform because the company derives value from the grid across its customer base, it would be difficult for those customers to make such investments individually.

Among Demandware’s most interesting customers, in terms of use, is Bare Escentuals. A purveyor of “healthy” makeup, Bare Escentuals does a lot of marketing through print, electronic media and television (in the form of infomercials). Thanks in large part to the latter, Whitcomb says Bare Escentuals’ Web traffic varies unpredictably and at factors as high as 10x. Bare Escentuals also populates its site with a fair amount of rich media, a practice that is facilitated through Demandware’s use of Akamai’s content distribution technology.

Apparel company Timberland also utilizes Demandware to manage sites across several geographies and lines of business, all without needing to toil with infrastructure or application development. Whitcomb is especially proud that HP, a company with “all the resources in the world,” also sees tremendous value in using Demandware. Other customers include Playmobil, Sally Beauty Supply, Gardener’s Supply Co. and Playboy.com.

Although he believes that all applications that share core or common requirements will eventually find their ways into an on-demand delivery model, Whitcomb acknowledges that such models do bring with Web Development Classes them a certain degree of difficulty for the provider. These challenges include integration with legacy backend systems and third-party services, letting customers have control over the elements they want to control, and keeping the application current and reliable.

“The dimensions of that make it a real challenge to serve the enterprise,” says Whitcomb. “The enterprises certainly want it — they’re crying for it — and I think it’s up to the market to deliver against those strong needs. Demandware proves that, at least in the e-commerce market, it can be done.”

Web Development Tutorial said Thursday it released its new QuickBase Web development program in beta.

Mountain View-based Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU) said QuickBase is designed to let developers and independent software vendors “easily design, deploy and market on-demand collaborative and productivity applications to millions of small businesses.”

“We are now enlisting the help of an enormous community of talented developers to create innovative, rich Web-based solutions to important business problems,” said Bill Lucchini, vice president and general manager of Intuit QuickBase.

There is no cost to join the program during application development. Developers building on the platform will receive the QuickBase Developer SDK, which includes the toolkit for Adobe Flex, Web Development Tutorial a free QuickBase developer account and training resources.

SAN FRANCISCO Last-minute changes to the Olympic torch’s route through the only North American city on its world tour helped it evade not only protesters, but also fans who lined up for hours waiting for a historic sight that never arrived.”I’m disappointed, annoyed, tired, frustrated,” Sydney Sullivan, 18, said after unsuccessfully trying to chase the flame through the city. “I mean, it’s not every day you get to see the Olympic torch.”After its parade was rerouted and shortened to prevent disruptions by massive crowds of protesters, a planned closing ceremony at the waterfront was canceled and moved to San Francisco International Airport. The flame was placed on a plane and was not displayed.International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge expressed relief that the San Francisco relay avoided the turmoil of the torch’s previous stops in London and Paris, where demonstrators had tried to snuff out the flame.”Fortunately, the situation was better … in San Francisco,” Rogge said at an Olympic meeting in Beijing. “It was, however, not the joyous party that we had wished it to be.”The torch’s 85,000-mile, 20-nation global journey is the longest in Olympic history, and is meant to build excitement for the Beijing Games. But it has also been targeted by activists angered over China’s human rights record, its rule of Tibet and its support for the governments of Myanmar and Sudan.Chinese officials declared the San Francisco event a success and praised the route changes as a clever strategy for thwarting “Tibetan separatists.”The activists “ran into a brick wall in San Francisco,” the Global Times newspaper, published by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, said on its Web site. It called the changes a “brilliant idea.”Jiang Xiayou, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic torch relay committee, thanked San Francisco.”Perhaps some of them failed to see the sacred flame today,” Jiang said, speaking through a translator at San Francisco’s closing ceremony. “But we all have felt the passion of the Olympic movement.”Less than an hour before the relay began, officials cut the original six-mile route nearly in half.Then, at the opening ceremony, the first torchbearer took the flame from a lantern brought to the stage and held it aloft before running into a waterfront warehouse. A motorcycle escort departed, but the torchbearer was nowhere in sight.Officials drove the Olympic torch about a mile inland and handed it off to two runners away from protesters and media. The runners began jogging in the opposite direction of the crowds, and the procession gave front-row views to nearby residents, who leaned out their windows for the unexpected sight. More confusion followed, and the torch convoy apparently stopped near the Golden Gate Bridge before heading southward to the airport.As the flame traveled toward the airport, news dribbled through the crowds of more than 10,000 spectators and protesters gathered at the waterfront that the torch wasn’t coming. While Olympic fans dispersed in disappointment, many protesters were undeterred by the development.”I think it was very strange that the torch seemed to be running away from the people, but it was a good day because attention was focused on some very important issues,” said Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition.San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong said the decision was made after protesters who swarmed into the street along the original route refused police orders to get back behind barricades. Disputes among China protesters and supporters were escalating into “pushing and shoving matches,” Fong said, and one protest group began breaking windows on a bus.”We had serious concerns about the possibility of additional violence, of additional disruption … if the torch bearers were to run along this route,” Fong said. “We felt it would not be safe.”There were signs of tension even before the torch relay began. Pro-Tibet and pro-China groups had side-by-side permits to demonstrate, and representatives from both sides spilled from their sanctioned sites across a major street and shouted at each other nose to nose, with no visible police presence to separate them.Farther along the planned route, about 200 Chinese college students mobbed a car carrying two people waving Tibetan flags in front of the city’s Pier 39 tourist destination. The students, who arrived by bus from the University of California, Davis, banged drums and chanted “Go Olympics” in Chinese.”I’m proud to be Chinese and I’m outraged because there are so many people who are so ignorant they don’t know Tibet is part of China,” Yi Che said. “It was and is and will forever be part of China.”Only a handful of arrests were made, and no major incidents were reported, police said.Local officials say they support the diversity of viewpoints, but tightened security following chaotic protests during the torch’s stops in London and Paris and a demonstration Monday in which activists hung banners from the Golden Gate Bridge.Vans were deployed to haul away arrested protesters, and the Federal Aviation Administration restricted flights over the city. One of the runners who planned to carry the torch dropped out earlier this week because of safety concerns, officials said.Torchbearers in other cities have complained of aggressive behavior by paramilitary police in blue track suits sent by Beijing to guard the Olympic flame. Although there were no major problems reported in California, they did make their presence felt.At least one torchbearer decided to show her support for Tibetan independence during her moment in the spotlight. After being passed the Olympic flame, Majora Carter pulled out a small Tibetan flag that she had hidden in her shirt sleeve.”The Chinese security and cops were on me like white on rice, it was no joke,” said Carter, 41, who runs a nonprofit organization in New York. “They pulled me out of the race, and then San Francisco police officers pushed me back into the crowd on the side of the street.”Peter Ueberroth, chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, said the U.S. had struck the right balance between preserving freedom of speech for protesters, providing an exhilarating experience for the torchbearers, and preventing a repeat of the chaotic demonstrations that accompanied the torch in London and Paris.”As close as anybody can do in a free society, so far it’s looking very good,” Ueberroth said. “Virtually anybody and everybody is being heard.”On Friday, the IOC’s executive board is to discuss whether to end the remaining international legs of the relay after San Francisco because of widespread protest. The torch is scheduled to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then to a dozen other countries before arriving in China on May 4. The Olympics begin Aug. 8.After the San Francisco event, Indonesian officials announced it would significantly shorten its leg of the Olympic torch relay in the capital, Jakarta, citing security concerns. Their relay was scheduled for April 22.Rogge has refrained from criticizing China, saying he prefers to engage in “silent diplomacy” with the Chinese.Meanwhile, the White House said anew that President Bush would attend the Olympics, but left open the possibility that he would skip the opening ceremonies. Asked whether Bush would go to that portion of the games, White House press secretary Dana Perino demurred, citing the fluid nature of a foreign trip schedule.A spokesman for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he would not attend the opening ceremony. Brown’s office said the decision was not aimed at sending a message of protest to the Chinese government, that Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell will represent the British government at the opening, and that Brown would attend the closing ceremony.London is hosting the 2012 Olympics and British officials were expected to attend events throughout the games.French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he is debating not attending the opening ceremony as a protest of China’s crackdown in Tibet.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. Traditional wireline provider Embarq Corp. is offering a new cordless home phone that includes Internet-powered features it hopes will help it hold on to customers.The company, which lost 6.3 percent of its access lines in 2007 - ending the fiscal year with 6.47 million - expects to continue losing them at that rate or faster in 2008.Embarq began losing customers well before Sprint Nextel Corp. spun it off the local-phone division in 2006, but it remains the nation’s fourth-largest traditional telephone provider.The Embarq eGo, which the company began selling Tuesday, works like a regular landline phone but has a video screen and can hook into the customers’ high-speed Internet connection.Customers can use it to check weather and sports and general news culled from Internet sites, access an online local business directory and scroll visually through voice mail and lists of frequently called numbers.”We are attacking why would you ever want to use your wireless phone in your home,” said Dennis Huber, Embarq’s senior vice president of corporate strategy and development.Customers must have high-speed Internet to use eGo. The handset and a base station that connects to the Internet router cost $130. Extra handsets - the system can support up to five per household - are $50 each. Discounts will be available on eGo in Embarq’s retail stores.Overland Park-based Embarq hopes eGo will keep customers from abandoning their home phones in favor of cell phones or Internet-based telephone service.Huber said the eGo is aimed at providing customers some of the same content they can receive through their personal computers or cell phones - just quicker and cheaper.”We, over the past 100 years, have been great at selling people connectivity,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is add value to that connectivity.”Using the customer’s ZIP code, the eGo can provide local weather forecasts and list times of movies showing nearby or help users find the closest pizza parlor and immediately call it.Product developer David Rondeau said Embarq will continue developing services for the eGo, including eventually some premium offerings.